The Viceroys (19 page)

‘Aha!…' she screamed, flinging herself on her nephew and giving him a great slap.

The boy let out as sharp a shriek as if he were being murdered.

‘I've told you a thousand times not to touch my things! I can't keep a single thing to myself any more! I might as well be in the street …'

At those desperate shrieks, in rushed Vanna the maid, but she had scarcely begun, ‘Signorina … let him go …' when the prince appeared.

‘How dare you raise a hand to my son!'

‘He just won't obey!… I can't keep even a pin to myself …'

He raised Consalvo from the floor, took him by the hand and said slowly, staring hard at her:

‘Another time, if you dare touch my son I'll hit you; d'you understand?'

She stood there for a moment, stunned. When her brother left, she rushed to the door, shut it by banging it violently, and did not answer any of the servants who came to call her for dinner. The duke had to come up and beg her to open the door.

At the duke's remonstrances and warnings, she finally burst out:

‘Patience? Why, he's been treating me like this for two months!… What has he against me? Something to do with our mother's Will? Is this part of playing his cards? Was Don Blasco right then?… Have you heard, has Your Excellency heard what he's just done?'

‘What's he just done?'

‘He's refused to recognise the legacy to the Convent of San Placido!… We found Angiolina sobbing and the Abbess breathing fire and flame … he wants to deal all cards himself, and treats us in this high and mighty way, to degrade us all …'

‘Quiet!… Enough for the moment …' The duke begged her once more for the love of peace, ‘Enough!… come and dine now … I promise you I'll talk to him later …'

Raimondo had not yet returned when the whole family, with Don Mariano, sat down to table. Lucrezia's eyes were still red, her head was bowed, she did not say a word. But the prince now looked quite serene and chatted courteously with the duke. Every day it was like this; after long hours of sulks, silence, turning his back on his brothers and sisters and even more on his sister-in-law Matilde, at table he put off his frowning mien to be polite to his uncle. It was not the first time that the dinner started without Raimondo, and Lucrezia's ill-humour was reflected that day by a shadow on Matilde's brow.

They were not very nice to her in that house. The prince, Donna Ferdinanda, Don Blasco, and to some extent even Cousin Graziella must have found unpardonable faults in her, because
they were so constantly criticising her or being very off-hand in their treatment of her. But she forgave all their rudeness to her; what she could not endure was rudeness to her husband. Perhaps that was her great fault, the love she had for Raimondo!… She had loved him ever since she had seen him, even before; since when, affianced by letter to that Count of Lumera whom her father, proud of becoming connected to the Viceroys, praised endlessly, she had let her imagination represent him as handsome, noble, generous, and knightly, as a hero of Tasso or Ariosto. And the reality had been superior to anything she had imagined. How fine he was, her husband, how graceful and comely and splendid, and she who had never known other men closely, who had fed only on dreams, poetry, on fantasy high and pure, had given him her whole self for ever; she had loved him even in those dear to him, and idolised him in the daughter born from him. She had no other idea of life than that expressed in her own simple and even existence, spent with her sister Carlotta, with their mother, that sweet sad memory, and her father, a man of violent passions, friend or enemy till death of other men, but blind and crazy in his love for his daughters …

Now, as she turned again and again to look at the door, anxiously waiting for Raimondo's arrival, the scene before her reminded her of another, in lively contrast, indelibly etched on her mind. Memory conjured up for her the family board in the big dining-room of her father's house in Milazzo; her mother, her sister, she herself, intent on her father's stories, smiling with him, sad or sorrowing with him; her father, his every thought and action concentrated wholly on them; a constant almost superstitious respect for ancient habits, patriarchal peace, reciprocal love, absolute confidence. If she looked round now, what did she see? The princess, timid and fearful before her husband; the boy trembling at a glance from his father, but proud of the humiliation inflicted on his aunt; Lucrezia and her brother still cold and suspicious with each other; the prince making an ostentatious play of good humour with the duke after a day of frowning silence.

She had not even suspected the passions dividing this family, on the day she had entered it as another family of her own; with what amazement and sorrow had she noticed the grim resentment
with which they repaid her! They considered, of course, that she was unworthy of Raimondo because inferior to him. No one put him higher than herself, but she had not been helped by feeling and being humble before him and them; their rancour had not been placated. Then she had begun to realise the separate passions which, apart from pride, animated each of these hard, violent Uzeda … Raimondo's mother, idolising her son to the point of being jealous of his wife; so after getting him married and ensuring his dowry she humiliated her daughter-in-law, using an iron hand from the very first day to enforce true subjection to her favourite. But the wife's idolising submission and blind devotion took away any pretext for cruelty, threw new fuel on the flames of maternal jealousy, and made Donna Teresa implacable. The elder brother, unable to forgive Raimondo's privileges or to resign himself at having Raimondo's family competing with his own, turned his rancour against his sister-in-law. All the others had been pitiless against the intruder, either from hatred at the princess, who had brought her into the family, or from hatred of Raimondo, whom the mother protected.

Thus she found herself the target of these relations to whom she had come with confident soul and warm heart, and the discovery that their hatred was as bitter against her as against Raimondo instead of lessening her suffering had sharpened it; for being deeply in love with her husband she suffered and enjoyed through him and for him … Whenever the prince seemed not to see his sister-in-law or, turning in her direction he suddenly put off his jovial air and showed her a face grimmer than if she were a stranger, it was not so much that ostentatious coldness which made her suffer as the indifference shown by all towards her husband.

Dinner progressed as if he would no longer be coming; no-one asked after him, Lucrezia still kept her head bent over her place, the princess tended her son, the prince talked about the condition of the estates, the price of produce, and the dangers of cholera, the duke discoursed on the war in the East, and it was only the stranger, Don Mariano, who said now and again:

‘Where's Raimondo?… Isn't he coming?… What can have happened to him?'

Then that question resounded in her thoughts, as if by an
echo, ‘Isn't he coming?… What can have happened to him?…' Why was he so late? Why did he leave her alone among all those hostile or indifferent strangers?

‘The Russians are still holding out … a hard nut to crack … Napoleon knew a thing or two about that …'

Absorbed again in graver and more disturbing thoughts, she heard snatches of phrases, words whose sense she could not catch. How long he had left her alone, Raimondo! How long, how long!… She remembered only too well the first pain he had inflicted on her, long ago. Good to her just after their marriage, during the honeymoon and their stay at Catania; as soon as they reached Milazzo, where they had gone on business to see her father and sister, he declared that he had not married to live in that hovel, to fall under his father-in-law's tutelage after having got away from his mother's … Of course she saw that life in her little native town could be no fun for him. Of course she would follow him wherever he cared to take her. Yet that brusque judgement about things and people dear to her heart had given her a pang of unforgettable anguish. He wanted to leave Sicily for ever, to go and live in Florence; his mother's disapproval had been no obstacle. To his wife, who, to avoid being moved too far from her own family, exhorted him to obey, he answered brusquely, ‘Let me do things in my own way!' And yes, she had realised his reasons. Sicily, Tuscany, any part of the world where they would be happy together, was it not all one to her? Could her mother-in-law's despotic veto weigh more with her than her husband's wishes? And were those wishes of his not legitimate maybe? Was her Raimondo not one made to figure in the exclusive society of a great city? Young and rich, would they not be the envy of all no matter where they went?… And she had not persevered in her efforts at resistance for another, more serious, reason too.

Raimondo, whose rather brusque ways she forgave or rather tried to ignore, his dislike of contradiction, all the little defects of a spoilt son, showed his real self to his father-in-law. The latter's character being, very strong, a quarrel might break out from one moment to the other. At first the baron had gone out of his way to treat his son-in-law well, as if he were the princess herself, charmed too by the young man's exquisite grace and
proud of his good fortune in being connected with the Francalanza, but Raimondo had replied to all this zeal and affectionate care by a show of discontent with everything in that house by repeating every quarter of an hour:

‘How on earth can people live here?…'

The baron had got from him a Power-of-Attorney to administer the property given to his daughter, and he intended to follow old methods whose worth he knew. Raimondo, on the other hand, to occupy his spare time in Milazzo, when he did not spend the whole day gambling at the Casino with good-for-nothings quickly met, insisted on his father-in-law rendering an account of all his dealings in order to criticise them and suggest ones which in his opinion should be adopted. In such matters he showed an absolute ignorance of affairs, an irresponsibility very similar to his brother Ferdinando's; the baron laughed at him and he took it badly. But the tables were turned when the baron asked him how he had placed the capital of the dowry; then he criticised certain ill-considered operations of his son-in-law, and the latter declared that his father-in-law understood nothing. Often, in those discussions, at Raimondo's lively rejoinders, the baron had to make a visible effort to control himself lest he lose his temper. Then Matilde would intervene, change the subject of conversation, making up the petty disagreement with many a smile bestowed equally on the two people whom she loved most in the world.

Thus, to her great sorrow, she realised that if she wanted to see them at peace, she must avoid their spending any time together. So she decided to support her husband's wishes and follow him to Florence. But this last decision of Raimondo's had been the cause of the most lively opposition from the baron, who wanted his daughter near him and judged an establishment in a great city to be too costly, advising short trips to the mainland instead. Raimondo had replied shortly that this was silly advice, because trips would cost a fortune, and turning his back on his father-in-law, he declared to his wife in crude, over-harsh and unjust words that he could no longer endure the other's interference in his private affairs. Then, to win over her father's opposition she had had to fall back on the expedient she had used so many times as a child: to tell him that the plan to live
partly in Tuscany was dear to herself, and beg him to please her …

‘Waste of money and lives … A war so far away!…'

While the duke was still disembowelling, the Eastern Question and suggesting diplomatic combinations, all turned towards the entrance door. The countess gave a start, hoping it was her husband; instead of which Don Cono Canalà advanced ceremoniously: ‘Good day to each one of you!… But I don't see the count?' Yes, in Florence too, a city where she not only had no relations but, at first, not even an acquaintance, she had spent long hours, day after day, awaiting him in vain. There she had wept her first tears on finding herself neglected; there she had hidden herself to sob, as he either derided her for her ‘silly' devotion or declared that he did not want to be ‘bored' …

Their ways of seeing life were radically different; while she put above all her love for her husband and her family's happiness and wished only to prolong, by Raimondo's side, in other settings, the ineffable domestic joys she had felt as a girl, the young man, spoilt by his mother and away from her iron bondage at last, aspired only to freedom and pleasure. Telling herself that he had a right to amuse himself, that he was doing no harm or wrong, that people had different tastes by nature, she had repressed her own sorrow and convinced herself of being in the wrong. As a reward for her resignation she had finally been granted the joys of motherhood; then as if by enchantment the happy days of the honeymoon seemed to return, either because Raimondo really did improve, or because she herself, absorbed in sweet thoughts and detailed cares, dwelt less on his life. To her father when he visited her on that occasion she was able to show a radiant face; in his joy at her happiness the baron entirely forgot his squabbles with his son-in-law, and became as fond of him again as in the early days … All were expecting a boy, except herself who, had she dared go against anyone else's wishes and make a distinction between one child and another, would have preferred a girl. A girl in fact was born; and when it came to baptising her, although Matilde and her father wanted to call the child by the name of her dead mother and his dear wife, they acknowledged even so the suitability
of giving her the princess's name. Did the happy mother remember her own rough treatment by her mother-in-law and her husband's relatives? Was this not a little angel come to tighten the knot uniting her with Raimondo, to dissipate the clouds threatening her clear sky, bringing only peace and love?… But alas! Sooner than she could have thought possible, she had realised her own deception. Ever since their arrival in Florence her mother-in-law had not written to her or answered her letters or mentioned her in letters to her son. The silence continued during her pregnancy and, after the birth, included the baby too.